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Copy * 





%\t Crisis 0f JfrnHm. 



SERMON, 



PREACHED AT THE 



FREE CHURCH, IN LYNN, 



ON SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 1854. 



BY SAMUEL JOHNSON. 




PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE SOCIETY. 



BOSTON: 

CROSBY, NICHOLS & CO., Ill WASHINGTON STREET. 

1854. 






t& 



%\)t Crisis 0f f rttflflm. 



SERMON, 



TKEACHED AT THE 



FREE CHURCH, IN LYNN, 



ON SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 1854. 



BY SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE SOCIETY. 



BOSTON: 

CROSBY, NICHOLS & CO., Ill WASHINGTON STREET. 

1854. 






Cornell 



boston : 

printed by stacy and bichakdsoh, 

No. 11 Milk Street. 






<~7 



SERMON. 



"He looked foe Justice, and behold Murder; for Righteousness, 

AND BEHOLD, THE CRT OF THE OPPRESSED." Isaiah V., 7. 

Sunday before last, I spoke of the signs of the times, and the 
new aspects of Slavery; and more especially of the atrocious 
attempt then making, to kidnap a citizen of Boston. A few 
dismal days have passed, — loveliest of June days made dismal 
by the huge shadow of human sin, — and now the deed is done ! 
We have seen a second hideous rite performed on these altars of 
slavery in Massachusetts — these abominations of desolation, 
standing where they ought not ; performed this time in open day, 
with all the pomp and parade becoming a solemn sacrifice in the 
name of the State. We have seen every outrage on public senti- 
ment, every aggravation of the cruelty inherent in the Fugitive 
Law, every accessory in the time, place, and process, conspiring 
to make the wickedness thorough and complete. No wonder that 
men who had trusted in the dignity and nobleness of human 
nature until then, felt that foothold of faith give way, and the 
billows of despair go over them. No wonder that men who had 
loved and defended slavery till then, turned away from that spec- 
tacle, confuted and changed. For "the sum of all villanies" 
did indeed make bold and full avowal therein, of its instincts and 
its means. There was guilt enough concentrated in the rendition 
of that poor negro, to perpetrate a thousand heinous crimes. Sla- 
very had armed it all with one deadly purpose, and made it over- 



4 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

sweep, for the moment at least, every guarantee of liberty, every 
humane impulse, every moral and religious conviction. It seemed 
as if new hosts of evil had rushed suddenly, with a boundless 
license, upon the world. Yet it was not so. The patient laws 
of retribution did not hasten, nor the pitying love of God with- 
draw. The wickedness iuas already in our midst. It did but start 
forth, then and there, out of the dark, — like that shape we saw 
moving across the face of the sun, — and press in between us and 
the light of God\s great law, that we might know what its mass 
was, and what its path. It was here already. It is here noiv, — 
stupendous, nigh inconceivable, with its work before it, and its 
whole might strained to its work. Let us remember this ; for 
what a warning have we had of coming woes ! 

The shadow will not go back on the dial, and what is done is 
done. The hateful record has gone forth, to make us the scoff of 
despots and a shame to freemen, wherever the sun shines. But 
the iron has not entered our souls in vain, if we have learned to 
feel how miserably Massachusetts lies fallen, and what a mockery 
are our churches of Christ and our charters of Freedom. 

Let us repeat the old truth, again so terribly enforced. The 
idea of property in man cannot possibly remain embodied in the 
institutions of a nation, without utterly destroying everything in 
that nation that is sacred, honorable, just or pure. So long as one 
attribute of manhood survives in any individual in that nation, 
Slavery has a new gyve to fasten, a new victim to brand. You 
may try to cripple or neutralize it, in this section, or confine it 
to that; you may think your public sentiment has reduced it to 
a dead letter, and that however it may rage in its own limits and 
on distant borders, you are sate from its immediate power, in your 
churches, and schools, and laws. It is a fatal delusion. If Sla- 
very is embodied in your government, it is in every aook and 
by-way of the land. It is at every fire-side; it is poisoning 
every conscience and heart. It is school-master, and preacher, 
and lawyer, and soldier. it is merchant and politician: it is 
miscreant and ruffian. It moves every aim of the social ma- 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 5 

chinery. It controls the respectable classes by bribes and threats, 
and the vicious classes bj sympathy. And you awake from your 
dream to find it here, in full stature, wielding its bloody scourge 
over the poor, mocking at the arms that hang powerless at your 
sides, and using the popular respect for law as its most pliant, 
unquestioning tool. 

A fortnight ago, men thought the Fugitive Act was dead, in 
Boston ; public sentiment, they said, was against it, and so was 
Massachusetts law. For all that, Anthony Burns was not saved. 
What help were law and sentiment to him ? Slavery was in the 
Government of the land. Massachusetts had her hand clasped in 
the slaveholder's clutch ; she dared not withdraw it, because the 
Slaveholder was the Government. And so long as we are under 
a slaveholding Government, that clutch will not be shaken off. 
Massachusetts should have understood this, long ago ; she has 
not, and here is the issue. 

What crushing evidence she has stood out against ! The gov- 
ernment has been the Pandemonium of Slavery for years, yet 
she has fancied herself a Free State. Freedom has no inch of 
soil on which it can set up for even a peculiar institution, is not 
even so much as sectional ; is swept out of the territories, and 
browbeaten and crushed in the conventions, and bullied and out- 
voted in Congress, and turned into an outlawed Pariah, to be 
cheated, scorned, beaten, left for dead every day. Massachusetts 
has bowed her head to the yoke, and kissed the rod every stroke 
it gave. Massachusetts is an integral part of the government, 
though a trampled one. And yet she was boasting that she had 
grown so Anti-Slavery since the dark time of Thomas Sims, that 
no more slaves would be returned. What a foolish boast was 
that ! The Fugitive Law was but getting refreshed while it slept. 
It starts up in the midst of our philanthropic and religious festi- 
vals, stretched and swollen beyond its natural proportions of 
hideousness. Overriding Constitutional provisions and State 
Laws ; trampling down habeas corpus, jury trial, personal reple- 
vin, frightening our executive officers out of the discharge of 



6 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

their functions, with its bribed judge and its arbitrary process, 
atheistic and diabolical, consigning a living man as property into 
the hands of ruffians, — this Fugitive Law, comprehending under 
a new significance for soul and body both, all the horrible stories 
of barbarism we can remember — of infants thrown into rivers, 
passed through the fire to Moloch, exposed to mountain wolves, 
the victim's heart torn out by Aztec priests, the great human 
holocaust of Druid worship, — this Fugitive Law starts up in our 
paradise of Churches, Schools, Laws, — and clutches its victim. 
It brings the scum of the city purlieus about the Court House to 
expel the people ; points cannon and bayonets at them, to show 
that an upstart demagogue, here as in Europe, may open his 
coup d'etat with a massacre; blockades the ways of business with 
tipstaves, and treats the peaceful citizens with brutal indignity. 
Worse than that, — worse, because more incredibly shameful, — 
it finds among the thousands of that great city a judge, who is 
ready to do all its pleasure, and then give it more help out of 
pure love and fear ; who lends the man-stealer the benefit of a 
clause in the Statute which he had no right to claim ; and then, 
when every other means of gratifying the Slave Power at Wash- 
ington by the sacrifice of his brother, is wrested from him by 
the unexpected mercy of counter testimony, and the noble fidelity 
of skilful counsel, dares to condemn the innocent out of his own 
lips, and on evidence of a person who had come hundreds of miles 
that the kidnapping might not fail : — a judge, who has recourse 
to proving a man a chattel by assuming him a man, competent to 
bear testimony ; a man, having a free conscience and a free mind, 
which may be trusted as witnesses to prove that he has neither ! 
Such a judge it finds, more cruel and unblushing than the law. 
Then glorying in having found fit instrument for work so foul, it 
summons the whole military force of Boston, to protect its inso- 
lent menials from the indignation of the people, to open them a 
way down State Street, over a spot where the dead stones seemed 
to join the living multitude, to cry shame ! — in order that Eoston 
might be forced to set her own seal to this outrage OD her laws. 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 7 

and that so, heaping all forms of humiliation on her head, this 
one bold robber might drag off his prize in triumph, sole master 
in Massachusetts that day. The Fugitive Slave Law is king. 
The Mayor obeys it with blind precipitation ; proclaims martial 
law against the popular instincts of liberty, and vests illegal and 
monstrous powers in the military to shoot down the citizens — 
the end whereof is a series of outrageous personal assaults, and 
almost a massacre and civil war. And there stood the wealth 
and respectability of Boston to see it done ; this dastardly deed 
their patriotism, this brutal incendiarism their law and order ! 
They stood cowed before that Virginia kidnapper, and did his 
will. Conscience had been voted a prejudice long before, and 
the Union higher than the Christian Law of Love, and now the 
kidnapper had come to judgment, holding them to their bond. 
The Mayor might have warned him out of the city, had they 
repented and said the word. The Governor might have sum- 
moned the Legislature, or at least executed Massachusetts laws, 
in order to thwart this wicked process. They made these sub- 
servient officers afraid to do Christian things, bold to do tyranni- 
cal and inhuman things, that kidnapping might not be offended. 
There they stood, and saw the deed. So loyal Boston pays divine 
honors to a slave-catcher. Meanwhile, a New England captain, 
no abolitionist, as I learn, is frightened out of Alexandria 
by a mob, for the sin of his northern birth. Slavery understands 
what masters can do, and what Slaves will bear. But Massachu- 
setts has understood nothing. She has only gone on boasting, in 
one breath, of ner loyalty to the Union, and of her Anti-Slavery, 
which had " made the Fugitive Law a dead letter." She needed 
this spectacle to teach her that there could be no such thing as a 
Free State, North or South, nothing but a little section of a 
slaveholding Union ; that the Heart must rule the members, and 
that Slavery is the Heart. But there is a Nemesis in Slavery, 
that will drive the truth in upon us in bitter judgments, until 
every soul of us shall feel and confess it. 

The men who had sought peace before purity, — the merchants 



<S THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

who had sent back Thomas Sims, to be beaten to death in Georgia, 
that State Street might prosper. — and the Clergy who had let 
that deed go unrebuked, and who still, Avhile their brother lay 
near by, fallen among thieves, — sat discussing Trinity and Unity 
and bandying statistics of tracts and funds, — knew that they 
were receiving their reward. From that poor hunted slave, set 
upon by a whole nation that he might be despoiled of his hu- 
manity, — there went up a cry of judgment against every com- 
promise of cowardice and greed, which no man. it seemed, could 
be so dull as not to hear and take to heart. " This," it said, " is 
the Union you have called sacred, and set up above the law of God, 
never to be moved. This is the Peace for which you have sold 
your freedom, and sacrificed your mercy and your faith. This is 
the ' great American Idea ' of Liberty ', which reconciles Northern 
Schools with Southern Scourges, and stands at once for the sum 
of all brutal oppressions, and the inalienable rights of man ; which 
your pulpits have called Christianity, and your political leaders 
and Fourth of July orators, Patriotism. See what it has made 
of you and of me." 

I do not know what effect this appeal wrought upon the con- 
sciences of influential persons in Boston. But I think the people 
did not wholly mistake its meaning. Mortified and degraded in 
their own eyes, they knew that their manhood and virtue were 
borne off with that defenceless man into chattel bondage, and 
must be recovered now, or lost forever. They recognised their 
relation to Slavery — that they were not what the politicians had 
told them, the indirect supporters of it as a sectional necessity, 
but its prostrate vassals in their own streets and homes. They 
felt it now as a Presence of wickedness, which had enveloped and 
crushed them. They saw how it allies itself with every form of 
profligacy and brutality in their midst, subsidizes disorganization 
and ruin, arrays all the vice in the community in arms against 
virtue, liberty, order — and gives it victory in the prostituted 
name of law. I cannot think New England has fallen so low as 
to look upon such sights without indignation and horror. And it 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 9 

was some comfort, in the degradation to which we saw ourselves 
reduced, to notice that there was but one feeling in that great 
multitude assembled to witness the burial of liberty ; no levity 
nor idle curiosity, but a gathering wrath, which servile bayonets 
might for a moment overbear, but which will not be suppressed. 
It was something to know that such a deed could not be done 
without the help of thousands of armed men, and numbers of 
these in their hearts disgusted and ashamed. It was something 
to know that whatever manliness exists among us, was roused by 
it to prepare for a struggle with Slavery, that will make no more 
concessions, endure no more insults, and slacken no energy till 
the victory is complete. It was something to feel that this new 
outrage had come at a moment when it would be most effective in 
giving a nobler and more generous purpose to that hostility to the 
Slave Power, which is just now stimulated by a sense of political 
insult, and a desire for revenge upon a treacherous ally. It is 
something that the Federal Government stands before us unmasked 
— as made in the very image of Slavery, and growing rapidly into 
a centralized despotism, resting on military force, and bent upon 
the destruction of every sacred right and law. It is something 
that the warnings of radical Anti-Slavery for years, are demon- 
strated to be no fanaticism, but the words of truth and soberness. 
Something that men are forced to acknowledge, that Freedom and 
Slavery are irreconcileable, and cannot exist in the same govern- 
ment ; something that a revolution of sentiment is sweeping over 
the North, which makes a dissolution of the Union no longer a 
question of probability among thoughtful persons, but simply a 
question of time. The revolutionary passion which this atrocity 
has aroused, and which is ready to take up arms, and wage a 
new war for Liberty on the old battle-fields, shows, one may trust, 
that a moral sentiment is coming, that shall know how to work 
more decisively and thoroughly, as well as more humanely, than 
the sword. 

It would be foolish, with our past experience, to be sanguine. 
Yet wc will accept all the grounds we can find for a new hope. 



10 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

Now that every thing the North had ignobly trusted in, has 
failed it, will it not fall back upon the moral instincts it has post- 
poned so long ? Has it not learned to cry with that old idolater 
of Mount Ephraim, " Ye have taken away my gods which I made, 
and the priest also, and ye are gone away — and now what have 
I more? " Are we so utterly lost that we shall not be taught by 
such intolerable outrages, to set at work radically at last with 
this question of questions — not upon the pocket and the party 
any more, but upon the conscience and the soul 1 Shall it not at 
last stir us to indignation to hear Slavery called " necessary evil," 
" peculiar institution," "constitutional right," or any other soft 
names of tolerance and charity ? Shall it not be what that dis- 
mal day in Boston showed it, the blackest and deadliest of lies, 
and shall we not "rid ourselves of it, as one would shake fire out 
of his bosom?" Two things at least every reasonable person 
has learned by this time ; that we have been destitute as a people 
of that faith in God, and love of the brother, that reverence for 
the soul, to which the very idea of property in man is an atrocity ; 
and that if Massachusetts is to be saved, nothing but this will do 
it ; that we have been trying every other expedient in vain, and 
rioiv must come to this. Think of it ! Every party among us 
has been calling itself Anti-Slavery by turns ; the whole land 
has been ringing with the noble word : and yet that one question 
of property in man has been utterly forgotten ! Has the Church 
taught that the slaveholder has no rights in his slave before God 
or before humanity, let laws say what they Avill? Have the 
politicians taught it 1 Have the children heard it in the schools ? 
Have the mechanics learned it of their masters? Do the colleges 
put it into their text-books ? I)o the Professors of Divinity ex- 
pound it out of the Law or the Gospel? Where, in the whole 
round of our ample culture, does that first deduction from the 
ideas of God and man find place ! Where is it set at work, to 
counteract the colossal denial of it that our political education 
propagates through every vein and nerve of the social body) It 
is too radical a doctrine for American Institutions. The Union 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 11 

could not stand before it a moment. Our Politics and Trade are 
abashed in its presence. Our Theologies are abstractions, and 
he who clothes them in the warm life of Love and Mercy, is a 
•• dangerous heretic and infidel." Our social prejudice against 
color, hates to recognize the negro as a man. Therefore we dread 
the principle of the equality of all men before God — democracy 
as we pretend to be. We do not believe in Brotherhood, covered 
as the land is with Churches of Jesus. "We do not dare to believe 
in it. Were there but a handful of us who did so, compared with 
the rest, — we should quicken such a moral sentiment through 
the community, that no slave-hunter could show his face in our 
streets, and no such creature as a slave-making Commissioner be 
procurable by any offer of place or gold. Have we not learned 
at last that nothing but this will serve 1 Is there any reasonable 
person who still hopes to prevent Slavery from swallowing up the 
Nation, by any principle of conduct less radical than this ) 

Slavery has its public sentiment ; united, vigorous, decisive. 
Slavery is centralized Despotism : on the plantation, in Congress, 
in the Court House of a Free State, everywhere alike, it is an 
imperious will, trampling down all laws, all courtesies, all hu- 
manities. You remember the programme it laid out for the 
North, in 1850. Freedom of thought and speech to be pro- 
scribed ; agitation for the spread of Slavery to be kept up, agita- 
tion against Slavery to be put down : the Church to be its timid 
apologist, its blasphemous voucher: the majesty of Law to be 
the pander to its greed ; God"s laws to be merged in the Compro- 
mises of the Constitution ; Congress, the political Conventions, 
and finally, the Executive, in its name and for its behoof, to man- 
ufacture all the conscience we have either the right to possess, or 
the obligation to obey ! 

What is all this, but the one idea of property in Man, devel- 
oped on a gigantic national scale l Whatever Slavery docs, be 
sure it will bear that stamp. How steadily it followed up this 
programme, from the very beginning of our history (for 1850 
only boldly confessed what 1787 stealthily began) ; how steadily, 



12 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

with what demonic energy of instinct, till the conscience of the 
North was but as wax between its thumb and finger, and the In- 
tellect of the North went back and forth at its bidding, sneering 
down the very idea of a God ! How it erected itself into the 
Religion of the State, covering up its blasphemies and lusts 
with respectabilities and prerogatives, — thousands of obsequious 
churches burning incense under its nostrils ! How it pensioned 
and secured the Press, took the Judiciary for its footstool, and 
turned Congressional legislation into a succession of bids for its 
favor, where he who had sunk the lowest, to offer it most beastly 
service, received the heaviest curses and blows ! How it made the 
organic impulse of Northern statesmanship consist in hankering 
after the flesh pots of Egypt, and the pleasant cisterns of Pharaoh, 
King of Slaves ! Then see how 'it has advanced to the final, com- 
plete embodiment of itself, in the person of the Executive, — first 
regularly lowering the standard of worth and capacity, through a 
series of incumbents, till the requisite subserviency was reached, 
then bringing all its force to create a centralized Despotism, to 
act the Louis Napoleon and the Czar, in the name of Democracy, 
and proclaim martial law over its vast plantation, from California 
to Maine, to last till Liberty shall perish, and the oligarchy of 
Three Hundred Thousand rule, unresisted, the twenty millions of 
slaves. 

Slavery is always true to itself. It mobs a Massachusetts civ- 
ilian in South Carolina, and then sends on its armed man-hunter 
to put Boston in a state of siege, and drive her citizens out of 
their streets and shops with her own bayonets, and be escorted 
off in submissive pomp, with his prey. It strikes its blows thick 
and fast, so as to disable and stun us. It flings solemn compacts 
to the winds, insults the North with ribaldry and bluster to back 
the treachery, and then carelessly issues its new ukase — that 
Cuba, Hayti, and the Amazon be annexed to the South, the 
African Slave Trade reopened, and the continent Africanized, so 
that the black chattels shall be counted on Bunker Hill as quietly 
as in the slave-pens of Norfolk and Charleston! 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 13 

How it has changed the heart of a great Nation, — first mak- 
ing her turn apostate, and then glory in the bold confession of 
her shame ! Once our " Manifest Destiny ; ' meant the pride of 
a free people in the liberty they had won. Soon it meant exten- 
sion of Slavery, in the name of Liberty; and then — saddest 
spectacle of moral suicide ever seen — extension of Slavery in 
the name of Slavery itself ! The World's Model Republic is at 
last the world-propagandist of Slavery. You cannot laugh at 
Southern bluster any more ; Northern subserviency has made it 
tragical. The more extravagant the scheme of oppression, the 
surer of success. Rowdyism and knavery are jubilant. It is a 
time of inverted values, when the drunken ravings of Southern 
representatives, and the most arrant fustian of fillibusters, are 
actually portentous of coming fate ; and when a people who came 
of the good stock of Algernon Sidney, George Fox, and Harry 
Vane, have mainly dwindled into a herd of trading politicians, 
afraid to stand upright, to brave proscription, or refuse bribes ! 
Slavery understands all this ; and the end is not yet. 

And so it has followed up its Idea of Property in Man, in the 
face of every industrial disadvantage, with bankruptcy at its doors, 
and the presentiment of a servile war ; and all the wealth, enter- 
prise and order of the North is chained fast to that horrible false- 
hood, to bear its burden and to share its doom. There is no help 
for it, but to believe and follow up, with like devotion, the Christ- 
ian Idea of Brotherhood and Equality. And there is no time for 
delay, if we are to avert the avenging consequences of such a 
past as ours. What is to be done 1 

One may trust that every honest politician sees at last his one 
plain duty ; sees that old party lines must be dropped, and union 
for the protection of Northern liberty affirmed and secured ; that 
Massachusetts must be put at once into the hands of such Execu- 
tive and Legislative officers as will establish guarantees for free- 
dom, and dare to maintain them; that a stand must be made 
upon State Rights, as the last defence against these monstrous 
usurpations of Federal authority which now pass for genuine 



14 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

Democracy among men who have all their lives clamored against 
centralized power : that the State must fall hack upon its sov- 
ereignty yioiv, if it does not mean to lose it forever. This is 
surely no time to he quarrelling for names or organizations, "when 
every right of freemen is in deadly peril. Neither is it a time 
for half measures or prudent compromises. It has been proved 
to the hitter dregs what they arc worth. This odious statute 
concerning fugitives must he nullified. Vermont has practically 
done this ; — has barred out its savage anarchy with conservative 
and humane legislation. Why should not Massachusetts '? Let 
the voters put strong men into office, men with large hearts and 
steady wills, no matter of what party, so they may.be trusted to 
follow the suggestions of manliness and mercy — and the work is 
done ; done without bloodshed, done without confusion, and with 
a dignity that shall make itself respected and sustained through 
the entire North. But there is no vote so efficient as that given 
to swell an indignant public sentiment. Let every man who soils 
his hands with the foul work of aiding or abetting kidnappers, 
be consigned to political and social infamy, and stamp the brand 
of Cain upon his brow before the world. Let him know that 
Massachusetts disowns him, that he is everywhere the moral out- 
cast, the mark of a public scorn that can neither be outfaced nor 
endured. 

And let the plotters against freedom in Washington be con- 
sumed, whensoever and wheresoever the lightning of moral indig- 
nation can reach them, and the country be redeemed in time, from 
the power of their impudent bluster, their reckless audacity and 
their fatal gold. Now, it is confessed, is the ripe moment for 
the North to show a united front. Slavery has set it free of all 
obligationSj whether real or supposed. The North is scouted 
from Southern soil, mobbed off, as Mr. Hoar was from South 
Carolina, and the Nebraska outrage is doing its proper work. 
At this moment the Fugitive seizures all over the Northern 
States, hurried on at the heels of this outrage to crush out what 
liberty remains, show you that a deadlier mischief than the No- 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 15 

braska Bill is here. Do not neglect the greater peril for a 
remote and secondary one. Guard your liberties at home first ; 
if these are lost, what good will liberties in Nebraska do 1 And 
if the North itself is to remain a bayonet-guarded barracoon, 
what foolishness to proclaim liberty in the wilderness upon its 
borders ! The stand must be taken here, in Massachusetts, and it 
must be a decisive one. Sending petitions for the repeal of the 
Fugitive Law will effect nothing, unless the State is secured by 
her own laws and Executive. A jury trial for the slave may do 
something, perhaps more than I dare expect from it : but juries 
may be packed, bribed, overawed ; and to bring this question before 
a jury at all ; concedes the whole abstract ground to Slavery, 
and is unworthy a Free State. The essential thing is, whatever 
laws we may have, that there shall be such a moral sentiment to 
back them, that no slave can be taken out of Massachusetts. If 
this is equivalent to dissolving the Union, what then ? I affirm 
that by every principle of political justice, as well as by every 
Divine law, the Union is dissolved already. You know I do not 
say this now for the first time. But I could easily see how, until 
this moment, many might honestly hold the Union sacred, and be 
ready to sacrifice a great deal to preserve its prestige. Now, the 
case is altered. I cannot comprehend what any Northern man, 
with any claim to sagacity or self-respect, can mean by profes- 
sing an attachment to the Union, or a sense of its worth. There 
is no foundation left for it to stand upon, either of moral right, or 
mutual confidence, or " sacred compact," or public safety, or even 
pecuniary interest. The Union was shown you concentrated in 
the scenes of that week of terror in Boston. — But if you still 
hope to find something better in the Union, still there is the same 
thing to be done by your political action ; — make laws to protect 
personal liberty in Massachusetts, and get them executed. Union 
or no Union, it must come to this. 

Men must follow their best instincts of justice and humanity, 
choosing their own modes of thwarting and preventing such atroc- 
ities as Ave have just witnessed. Not on such shall rest the respon- 



16 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

sibility, let what will befall. It is but a shallow trick in unprin- 
cipled political hacks, to aim their assaults at the foundations 
of government and order, and then charge upon the unavoidable 
protests of good men and Christian citizens, made in such ways 
as are left them, the anarchy which succeeds. Yet transparent 
as its baseness and foolishness are, they will hot cease to play 
that trick upon the people, till it is met by every honest man 
with scathing rebuke. They have overturned peace and order ; 
let them be held responsible for the issue. God forbid I should 
counsel armed resistance. If there is moral and spiritual freedom 
enough among us to make Massachusetts free, that will not be 
needed. If there is not, bayonets and revolvers are but ill pros- 
elyters for such freedom. But I know that if the indignation of 
this people continues to be provoked by these outrages, it will not 
stop with peaceful methods. And if the men who call themselves 
friends of law and order, if influential men in Boston regard the 
lives of the citizens, or the peace of the Commonwealth, they will 
see to it, as they can if they will, that no kidnapper is henceforth 
suffered to lay his hands on a citizen of Massachusetts. He is an 
assassin in his heart, who would so outrage liberty as to drive 
Boston again to the dizzy verge of civil war. The hateful touch 
of a slave-hunter is all that is needed to kindle a wrath which will 
not be put down ; and on the heads of those who have sought to 
murder the instincts of Humanity and Freedom, or have encour- 
aged others to do so, will fall the burden and the curse. 

I have mentioned some of the plain and pressing duties which 
the crisis must suggest to political parties. But let me remind 
you, friends, the work lies deeper than political measures. We 
shall not reach this matter of Slavery till a thorough moral revo- 
lution is set at work. That scene in Boston tells the whole story. 
A great city saw a man turned into a chattel, God's image sold 
like a beast, and did not prevent the deed; nay, worse, saw to it 
the deed was not prevented. It did not understand that Liberty 
is sacred; that there are inalienable rights. It did not under- 
stand what Brotherhood means, it understands money values. 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 17 

Such values as money cannot measure, it does not understand, is 
not educated to understand. Men calculated the commercial 
value of the Union and the laws to themselves, and then the 
commercial value of Anthony Burns' liberty to him, and weighed 
them against each other. That the soul of Anthony Burns 
transcended all values, and had more claim on their protection 
than all the laws in the world could have on their allegiance, 
merely as laws ; that the cry of one beaten, branded slave weighs 
more with the Judge above, than all the Constitutions and Unions 
that could be heaped together from all ages, to justify "or legalise 
his wrongs ; that they had got to settle this matter of the Higher 
Law, not with Congresses and city courts, but with the All-Just, 
whose sentence would be according to what they had done to the 
least of His little ones, Christ's brethren, that it would avail noth- 
ing before that tribunal, to call the Higher Law disorganizing and 
insane, — such things they did not understand. They understood 
obeying and enforcing the law ; shifting off the responsibility, 
with shallow sophistry, upon those who made the law, and then 
becoming its blind, unreasoning instruments to the most inhuman 
purposes ; as if moral retributions dealt in proxies ; as if govern- 
ments could give absolution for good impulses stifled, and right- 
eous convictions betrayed. 

And was it not natural enough ? Our education teaches that 
man is made for law and property, not law and property for man. 
And so when the law commanded the military and police of 
Boston to prevent the people from delivering the oppressed out 
of the hands of his tormenters, — they asked no questions, but 
obeyed. And when the interests of property seemed to demand 
that Virginia should be gratified by the execution of the Fugitive 
Law, the men of property and standing took sides, — whether 
passively or actively, it was the same thing, — with the spoilers 
of the poor. I am not offering excuses for deeds like these ; but 
what could you expect 1 And while the mass of men are educated 
down into this most wretched of all forms of slavery, to know no 
conscience but the will of the powers that be, and no Christianity 



18 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

but the interests of property, what hope can you place in political 
measures, or in laws 7 What is there short of a thorough revolu- 
tion in our modes of moral and religious culture, that would seem 
to be of the least service, when you reflect that all this wicked- 
ness, the very fifth essence of anarchy and lawless violence com- 
pressed into the terms of a statute, and then executed by arousing 
the vilest passions in society to its support, can override the public 
conviction, by virtue of bearing the name of law ? What possible 
advance can we make out of this shameful vassalage, till Ave set 
about enforcing the worth of man, the authority of conscience, the 
instincts of brotherhood, — against a blind idolatry of law because 
it is law, and a love of money as the root of all good 1 Until we 
do this, Slavery must exist in Massachusetts. It is as much at 
home here as in Georgia, and has a fee simple in the soil. The 
essence of Slavery is the absolute subjugation of man. And it 
will use Law and Commerce to effect this, as easily as the whip 
and chain. What matters it how it slays the conscience and the 
heart ; hoiv it brutifies its bondman 'I Virginia forbids her blaclc 
slave at home to read, and threatens him with stripes and starva- 
tion, that his spirit may be broken to her will. She comes to Bos- 
ton, armed with Law and Commercial interests, forbids her white 
slave to incpiire into his right to disobey the one, and threatens 
him with the loss of the other. Where is the difference ? Are 
not the last agents as effective as the first ? Which was the more 
abject slave, Anthony Burns or the Governor of Massachusetts, 
on that day when every State Right in Boston went down into the 
dust before a slave-catcher 1 Southern plantation whips were not 
needed. Northern " law and order" served as well. Some few 
men believed in a "law and order" that was not anarchy but 
justice and love. One nobly resigned his post that he might not 
dishonor his manhood. Others openly counselled disobedience, 
and did what they could to make it tell, some in one way, some 
in another. These were "rebels and traitors," — not to God, 
not to man, but to Slavery, — which stands for both in Massa- 
chusetts, to-day. 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 19 

Is Liberty to have safe-guards 1 Is law to mean law, and order 
to mean order, and a single inalienable right to stand? Then Ave 
must have consciences that will dare to trust themselves ; that 
will not hesitate to renounce allegiance to wickedness, let it come 
armed with what prestige it may, of law, custom, or arbitrary 
power ; making such protest against it as they can, in the name 
of God and the love of the brother ; waiting for no leader, for no 
party, for no government to sanction their doing, strong in that 
obedience which makes free indeed. Everything but this we 
have been taught in this country. To this alone Church and 
State and Market and School have alike been infidel. Till we 
propagate this truth with the energy and fidelity with which 
Slavery follows up its idea of property in man, we shall be rush- 
ing to ruin faster than any other nation that ever existed. For 
what hope of a republic, — where the popular character is the 
only reliance, and the popular will the last appeal, — if, while 
the Gospel of Jesus is proclaimed in every street, the light is so 
turned into darkness, and the truth into a lie, that all Christian 
men have from the beginning been " trembling for their country 
when they remembered that God is just?" What hope of a 
republic whose people wears that Christian Gospel for a phylac- 
tery, and a Declaration of Independence for a frontlet upon its 
brows, — and where conscience is nevertheless a scoff and by- word 
in the resorts of trade ; where the rogue and the trimmer sit in 
high places, while the just man walks the streets poor and pro- 
scribed, jeered and flouted at by the meanest of mankind ; — where 
military glory is the passport to office, and the never-failing ex- 
pedient of demagogues to cover their advances towards despotism : 
— where the multitude toss up their hats for an exiled Kossuth, 
and build the sepulchres of dead patriots, and then persecute the 
living prophets of Christian Liberty as fanatics and crown Slavery 
" magnificent in sin? " What hope but in an individual freedom 
and fidelity, which shall not abate its zeal till it has created 
under these ribs of death a new conscience and a new heart ? 

It is to crush out this individual manliness, its first and last 



20 THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 

enemy, that Slavery is now directing all its energies. By using 
the vast resources of the government for purposes of corruption, 
by making love and pity crimes, and brotherhood treason, by break- 
ing down with outrageous violence every guarantee of freedom, all 
belief in justice and in God. by stirring up an infatuated people to 
silence by intimidation, if possible, every voice raised in indignant 
rebuke of these subversive and inhuman schemes, — it hopes to 
accomplish its instinctive purpose. It is inaugurating this infer- 
nal jubilee of the " Lower Law," just as it has done in the nations 
of the past, which have gone down under its licentiousness and 
atheism, when they seemed at least as fair and great and enduring 
as we. And with us too it will succeed, if we do not work against 
it with a vigor equal to its own : if we do not work noAv, while 
the day lasts. For it is with us as it was with those elder Em- 
pires, — the night hastens on, when no man can work. And it is 
for us to say whether it shall be changed into the morning of a 
purer Christianity than the Christian church has ever before 
conceived, or overtake us in this height of our apostasy, and bury 
us also in the blackness of their ancient doom. It is not yet too 
late, and there arc signs of promise in the sky. Let the pulpit, the 
press, and the platform, let all moral energies, all political concert, 
all religious zeal, rally to the defence of Freedom, — each among 
us doing the part his conscience prescribes, and his abilities allow. 
Sustain and honor the few public men, who are standing nobly to 
their duty, in face of such temptations and perils as never before 
assailed American statesmen. Gird your households with a wall 
of fire, against the reckless and blasphemous political maxims, 
the terrors and the bribes of power ; against the new assumptions 
of authority over the conscience, Avhich are all the more perilous 
to the young for their pretension to the name of Democracy and 
Law. And let us still look hopefully to humanity, and in 
steadfast faith, to God. The hidden mystery of iniquity is at 
least driven forth into broad day, with its plots and schemes 
written all over its forehead, that justice may knoAV where to 
strike, and the omnipotence of love be roused to labor and to 



THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM. 21 

bear. Lies are weakness ; hide them ever so close ; throne them 
ever so high ; root them ever so deep. And while broken sceptres 
and fallen palaces are playthings of the storms of ages, the Soul 
has lost no tittle of its power. Its laws are the overruler of 
kings, the sovereign appeal from Constitutions, the patient Fate 
that shapes and saves the world. 

" God's Spirit shall give comfort ; He 
Who brooded soft on waters drear, 
Creator on Creation." 



" The crisis presses on us ; face to face with us it stands, 
With solemn lips of question, like the Sphynx in Egypt's sands. 
This day we fashion destiny, the web of fate we spin ; 
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin. 
By all for which the martyrs bore their agony and shame, 
By all the warning words of truth with which the prophets came, 
By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which cast 
Their faint and trembling beams across the blackness of the Past, 
And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died, 
my people, O my brothers, let us choose the righteous side ! " 




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